Wales
'We're Still Here': Rachel Trezise on her NTW play about Port Talbot steelworkersMonday, 11 September 2017
I’ve always written alone. As a novelist, that’s what you do. Sit around in your pyjamas composing sentences that come almost entirely from your own imagination. It’s difficult sometimes to conjure the self-discipline required to complete a draft in... Read more... |
Green Man Festival review - rustic Welsh epic is wet but joyfulWednesday, 23 August 2017
After the gruelling five-hour coach journey to Powys, Wales, we strolled over a bridge into Glanusk Park, through two security guards, and into Green Man with only so much as a sing-song “Bore da”. Satisfied, we picked a spot and set up camp in the... Read more... |
CD: Public Service Broadcasting - Every ValleyThursday, 29 June 2017
Every Valley is Public Service Broadcasting’s second studio album since 2013’s Inform - Educate - Entertain, and like its predecessors, it’s a nostalgic trip to the not-too-recent past with an electronica-heavy backing and a bag full of samples... Read more... |
Y Tŵr, MTW, Sherman Theatre, CardiffSaturday, 20 May 2017
Until yesterday my only experience of the Welsh language in the opera house was a few isolated passages in Iain Bell’s In Parenthesis last year and the surtitles WNO routinely put up alongside the English in the Millennium Centre. Now Guto Puw, a 46... Read more... |
Decline and Fall review - 'a riotously successful adaptation'Saturday, 01 April 2017
Like many first novels, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall has a strong whiff of autobiography. It is a revenge comedy in which Waugh – like Kingsley Amis after him in Lucky Jim – transmutes his miserable experiences of teaching in Wales into savage... Read more... |
Radio Cymru: Penblwydd Hapus (= Happy Birthday)Wednesday, 04 January 2017
Forty years ago, BBC Radio Cymru – the one and only Welsh-language national radio station – was born. It broke free from the world of opt-outs, where you might emerge from listening, say, to The Archers and stumble across a Welsh-language... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Super Furry AnimalsSunday, 20 November 2016
In 1996, the NME ranked Super Furry Animals’ debut album Fuzzy Logic as the year’s fourth best. It sat between Orbital’s In Sides (number three) and DJ Shadow’s Entroducing. Beck’s Odelay took the top spot and Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must... Read more... |
Cymbeline, RSC, BarbicanTuesday, 08 November 2016
“Britain is a world by itself.” It could be the slogan of the year – and rather longer, probably – but the phrase comes from Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline. Its Act III scene, in which Britain announces that it is breaking its... Read more... |
Aberfan: The Green Hollow, BBC FourMonday, 24 October 2016
Television is not a medium we much associate with any sense of the "sacred". It grapples with "momentous" frequently enough, in snatches of news tragically reported; it rings in, and out, the history that defines our lives. We may debate, equally,... Read more... |
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar ChildrenThursday, 29 September 2016
Tim Burton’s fans always want him to hit the sweet spot again, to give them another Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is not quite there, but it’s not for lack of trying. The weakness lies in Jane... Read more... |
CD: Gruff Rhys - Set Fire to the StarsMonday, 26 September 2016
Super Furry Animals front man Gruff Rhys is a quietly prolific talent. Every few years or so, there’ll be another album, complete with the kind of thought-through concept that gives lift to his literate and expressive story songs and colours them... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: On the Black HillThursday, 08 September 2016
Bruce Chatwin’s sense of place stayed slippery. If he had roots, they were in the Black Mountains across the Welsh border, a fond childhood memory he deepened for his third book with the rich anecdotes buried in old newspapers. The tale this... Read more... |
